Probably
the greatest letdown yet for the traditional
Holocaust
school of thought came during the second
week
of the Irving vs. Lipstadt libel trial, currently
underway
in London. While many
prominent defenders of
the
usual story had predicted that Irving would be
forced
to concede that he was wrong, and that
Holocaust
Revisionism would be exposed as a "sham,"
nothing
of the kind occurred.

In
fact, when the world's leading authority on
Auschwitz,
Robert Jan van Pelt appeared, he was not
able
to prove the dubious proposition that about one
million
people had been gassed and cremated at that
most
notorious concentration camp. Instead,
van Pelt
was
reduced to making the following bizarre claim:

We
may assert as moral certainty the statement that
Auschwitz
was an extermination camp where the Germans
killed
around one million people with the help of gas
chambers,
and where they incinerated their remains in
crematoria
ovens.

Of
course, a "moral" certainty is not a normal
certainty.
Indeed, we are inclined to regard a "moral
certainty"
as a "less than certainty" that requires a
little
moral support. After all, the
Law of Gravity
is
not a "moral certainty," it just is.
Dr. Johnson
refuted
Bishop Berkeley's claim about the unreality of
matter
by kicking a stone. He did
not do so by
appealing
to the stone's conscience. So the
long-awaited
proof that van Pelt offered to the court
in
London requires a little explanation, not least
because
his explanation, in our view, harbingers not
moral
certainty, but the certainty of future evil.
To
clarify
why this is so, we have to put van Pelt's
appeal
to faith in context.

For
the first fifteen years after World War Two, there
was
little heard about the Nazi camps, or mass
gassings,
or anything else. It was
generally agreed
that
millions died in the camps, but there was no
systematic
discussion of the matter. All
of this
changed
in the 1960's, first, with the publication of
two
books, William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the
Third
Reich and Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the
European Jews. These books had a certain amount of
impact,
because they repeated, albeit selectively,
some
of the more gruesome claims made at the Nuremberg
Trials.
Far
more important than either of these books however
was
the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and
especially
the propaganda associated with the Six-Day
War
in 1967.

For the first time,
we began to get a
differentiated
picture of the German atrocities, and
one
which focused almost completely on the fate of the
Jewish
people: it was here that we began to get the
"Holocaust"
that we have come to know and love. It
is
important
to note here that prior to the 1970s,
historians
rarely spoke in any detail about the Nazi
atrocities,
save to make a few comments about
"millions"
or possibly a passing reference to "gas
ovens."

Since
that time such comments, expanded with grisly
detail
and ideological content, have become almost
ritualistic.
This is the context in which modern
Holocaust
revisionism actually arose. Two of the
original
proponents, Robert Faurisson and Arthur R.
Butz,
simply took the received Holocaust claims and
subjected
them to standard historical analysis to see
how
well they stood up. The
claims did not stand
well;
hence, the demonizing of revisionism began then.
But
the empirical analysis of Butz, and particularly
Faurisson,
set the stage for empirical, on-site
archaeological
and forensic analyses which, by the end
of
the 1980s, had cast severe doubts on the veracity
of
Holocaust claims pertaining to mass gassing at
precisely
the time when such claims began to dominate
public
discussion.

It
was in order to salvage the traditional story that
the
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation published in 1989 a
lengthy
book by the Frenchman, Jean Claude Pressac,
who
attempted to prove the mass gassings simply on a
documentary
and physical basis. However,
the problem
with
Pressac's study is that he was not able to prove
the
existence of gas chambers at all, he could only
suggest
it, based on a tortured reading of the
remaining
documents and on what he called "criminal
traces"
for the existence of gas chambers.

Judging
by the content of his previous work, as well
as
his associations, it would probably be fair to
characterize
Robert Jan van Pelt as a protégé of
Pressac.
What he has tried to do in his writings as
well
as in his expert opinion is to prove that the
mass
gassings took place more or less as tradition has
decreed
and more or less on the basis of documents,
rather
than testimony.
But
van Pelt's expert report offers a big surprise.
In
the 330 pages of the report devoted to proving the
mass
gassing claim, 300 of these pages simply repeat
some
of the earliest propaganda claims. To
be sure,
van
Pelt makes a few half-hearted gestures in arguing
that
these early stories "corroborate" each other, but
in
fact the arguments for "independent corroboration"
are groundless. Then, when
he turns to the
documentary
record, van Pelt, like his predecessors,
can
find no specific references to gassing, no
blueprints
or architectural drawings that point to the
construction
of gas chambers, no proof of
architectural
modifications or even the fitting of the
holes
and wire mesh columns, all of which are vital to
the
legendary interpretation. Instead,
he offers only
a
few ambiguous documents and a "moral certainty."

And
where does van Pelt find "moral certainty? He
finds
it in the writings of John Wilkins, whose Of the
Principles
and Duties of Natural Religion from 1675 is
one
of the classics of" natural
religion," a
philosophical
and theological school that seeks to
prove
the existence of God, Providence, and thus
adherence
to the Scriptures on the basis of design in
Nature,
or, if you prefer, "criminal traces" of the
existence
of supernatural entities.

Let's
be clear about what we are saying here, and
about
what van Pelt is saying here. Religious
truth
exists
for any believer, and no one should have any
qualms
about that. But at the same time, we recognize
that
the truths of faith should be restricted to
communities
of believers; that's one of the reasons
why
the United States makes a distinction between
Church
and State.

It
should also be added that many Jewish groups, and
particularly
the ADL, have been quite adamant in
insisting
on the strict separation of sectarian
beliefs
("Church") from practically any public,
political,
or social manifestation ("State").
Van
Pelt's
"moral certainty" is not only self-consciously
based
on, but deliberately models, a highly sectarian
belief
system, which, since it cannot be proved
outside
of a moral context, can be either accepted or
rejected
by a rational mind. Therefore,
if such a
"moral
certainty" is used, either for purposes of
pleading
justification for libel, or for purposes of
institutionalizing
it as a universal truth, it is
violating
the right of citizens to reject this truth.

It
is even more pernicious than that. By
definition,
the
flip side of a "moral certainty" is an "immoral
doubt."
What this means is that anyone who fails to
accept
the certainty being offered runs the risk of
being
ostracized and marginalized as "immoral" simply
because
they cannot or will not accept the truth of
something
which someone else believes. This
opens the
door
for persecution, and further libel: after all, if
someone
is immoral, why should we care about them?

Despite
the common assurances that "You can't
legislate
morality," the fact is that once something
is
defined in the social context as immoral,
eventually
it becomes criminal as well. There's
no
real
mystery to this, in the sense that legislation is
frequently
just a way to memorialize our own
prejudices.
Hence, if we accept the equation of doubt
with
immorality in this particular case, we are well
down
the slippery slope that will lead to the eventual
criminalization
of anyone who is unlucky enough to
entertain
doubts about the Holocaust story, however
the
moral certainties of this story are retailed by
the
then reigning academic experts.

But
this crime will be unlike other crimes.
We can
accept
that societies will from time to time decide
that
certain actions must be deemed unlawful. Some of
these
laws may be problematic, or involve unacceptable
interference
in the private lives of individuals:
prohibition
of alcohol, drug use, prostitution, and
abortion
come to mind as examples. The
rights and
wrongs
of these can be debated, but they all involve
actions;
not simply words, but deeds. But
the
foreseen
violation of the "moral certainty" of
Auschwitz
will not involve any action that could
conceivably
be considered threatening. It would
involve
nothing more than the mental inability to
accept
as truth that which your betters insist is the
truth.
In other words, accepting the idea of the
"moral
certainty" of mass gassings at Auschwitz will
eventually
lead to a new species of
violation,—criminal
acts that happen inside your head.
George
Orwell had a name for it: Thoughtcrime.